


Can't Have Your Cake (trust me, you don't want it)

by Miramise



Series: I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends [6]
Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff and Humor, Gen, M/M, Piers Nivans (mentioned), Piers Nivans Lives, baking disasters, eldritch baking, mainly humor, no beta we die like men, the ships don't really show here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 02:05:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20381884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miramise/pseuds/Miramise
Summary: Sherry's birthday is tomorrow, and Jake, Chris and Helena are banned from the kitchen.  They think they found a loophole.  Turns out they're wrong about the loophole, and about their ability to follow the instructions on the back of a box of cake mix.





	Can't Have Your Cake (trust me, you don't want it)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chalkolate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chalkolate/gifts).

> Very very extremely belated gift to the wonderful Chalkolate. Thanks for being patient with me!
> 
> The ships are real, they just don't show up here much. So consider it gen for the most part. Still, hope you enjoy!

It was going to be a surprise. Sherry's birthday was tomorrow. Claire and Leon were handling decorations and food respectively. As he was doing the cooking, Leon opted to work in his own place. Claire recruited Piers to keep Sherry occupied and away from Leon's place while the younger Redfield turned it into a balloon-filled fun-fest. In fact, Chris, Helena and Jake were told to just show up and bring a gift. It had been implied—and at one point outright stated—that they were _forbidden_ from entering the kitchen. Leon had no faith in their ability to help him without the collapse of society occurring and banned then from setting so much as a toe into the cooking area.

They knew he was serious when Jake nearly lost his big toe. He'd inched it over the dividing line and found Leon's knife sticking out from the floor less than two centimeters from it not one second later.

So despite much grumbling and cursing and one 'You're not my dad!', the trio obeyed and did not enter Leon's kitchen.

"Pfft. How hard can this be?"

So they went to Sherry's kitchen instead.

Jake held up a box of Betty Crocker cake mix and skimmed over the instructions. "Seriously, dunno what Agent Pantene was so worried about. This looks easy." He glanced up when Helena snorted.

"Agent Pantene?" she asked, curious about the new nickname for Leon.

"You've seen his hair."

"...touché."

Chris rolled his eyes and ignored them. "Let me see." He grabbed the box out of Jake's hand, ignoring the redhead's squawk of indignation. "Huh, it does look pretty simple. Maybe Leon was on a control bender." He blinked when the box was then snatched from _his_ hand, courtesy of Helena.

"Normally he's not, but he becomes a damn zealot when it comes to baking. Still..." she smacked her hand against the instructions on the box. Yeah, this is a no-brainer. Not sure about decorating it, though."

"What's to know? You slap some frosting on it, make it smooth as a baby's ass, and stick a candle in it. Boom, done." Jake fetched the box back and reread the instructions. "Okay, so we need a cup and a half of water. Eh, that's easy." Jake searched in the dish drain—he hadn't put up the last batch yet—and found a couple of plastic cups. He filled one full, and the other half-full. "There, already off to a good start."

"We need a bowl first," Chris muttered while looking through the cabinets, "but I don't know what kind. Leon uses a mixing bowl, does Sherry have one?"

"She's got a punch bowl, and it's pretty big." Jake checked the cabinet next to the one Chris stood in front of. "I think it's—got it!" He pulled out a decorative glass punch bowl and handed it over. "That should do it."

Helena looked in the pantry and frowned. "That calls for vegetable oil, but I don't see any." She picked up a random bottle, scowl deepening. "I don't know what would be a good substitute."

Jake stopped his search for a hand mixer and thought about what they had. "We could use olive oil. There's some in the vinaigrette Solo bought."

That didn't sound _exactly_ right to Helena, but neither could she pinpoint why it might sound wrong. Eventually, she shrugged and grabbed the vinaigrette before looking for a measuring cup. Then it dawned on her what Jake said.

"Who the hell is Solo?"

Jake swore as he rummaged through a cabinet full of gadgets, (purposely ignoring the fact that most of them were purchased whenever he binged on the home shopping network). "What, I have to spell that one out?" His eyes swung up to see the glare Helena leveled at him. "Fine. Piers." The agent folded her arms over her chest, prompting Jake to explain. "Han Solo? Both okay shots. Both drive decent. Both got deep-sixed but came back—ow!" A string of muttered curses left him as Jake rubbed where Helena smacked him on the back of the head. "What the hell, hotpants?"

"That's so insensitive." She lifted a brow at Jake's unrepentant grin.

"He likes it, actually." His smirk grew when Helena rolled her eyes and went back to looking for something to measure the vinaigrette with.

Meanwhile, Chris had opened the mix and dumped it into the punch bowl. He looked at the instructions again and blinked when he saw how many eggs to use.

"This can't be right." Chris glanced up when he felt both Helena and Jake's eyes on him. "This says use three eggs, but I remember when my mom used to make cakes, she used six."

Helena came closer and read the instructions again. "Three does seem kind of low. Claire says box instructions are the bare minimum, and she's always adding more than what something calls for. Maybe your mom did the same?"

The hand mixer is located with a muffled "Ha!" and pulled out by Jake. He set it on the counter before joining the other two, eyes also glancing over the instructions. "Piers does the same." The younger male shrugged when Chris shoots a curious look at him. "What can I say? He looks at a lot of cooking videos on youtube. He's picked up a few tricks." Jake tapped the box. "I saw we use six. It's probably how Mama Field doctored it up."

"And since this will probably need all the help it can get..." Helena trailed off and went to get the eggs from the fridge. Jake grabbed the hand mixer and handed it to Chris. The captain was busy plugging it in while Jake grabbed a glass from one of the cabinets and realised it had numbers on it.

"Oh, hey, _here's_ a measuring cup." He knew the box called for a third cup of oil but decided to make it half since it as mixed with other stuff in the vinaigrette.

"Almost got the eggs ready," Helena called, cracking the last one into a cereal bowl she snatched from the dish rack. She noticed a bit of shell but thought it small enough not to be noticed. "Probably add calcium or some shit," she grumbled.

Chris didn't hear her clearly and opted to ignore it. "Let's put it all in the bowl, then I'll start the mixer."

"Here's the wet works." Jake balanced the water and vinaigrette as he walked over and dumped it all in the bowl. Helena joined them a moment later and added the eggs. Chris looked at the mixer and wondered what speed. He remembered Leon saying high speed was for whipped cream, so the captain went with the lowest setting instead. He wondered if he should turn it up a level when he noticed how slow the mix was blending, and how sludge-like it appeared. Chris was about to ask when the trio heard an ominous crack along the side of the bowl.

"Uh-oh." And neither the crack nor Jake saying that were good things to hear. As one, the three of them checked where the noise came from and noticed the large fracture in the bowl.

Chris grimaced and spoke first. "We can't keep using this bowl; some of the glass might break off and get in the batter."

"Just what we'd need. Try to make a cake and slice up someone's throat from the inside." Helena buried her head in her hands. "We'll never hear the end of it from the cooks in the group. Don't know what we—wait." The agent's head snapped back up. "What about a blender?"

"Shit, hotpants, you're a genius. And we have one cause supergirl's been on a smoothie kick." Jake sidesteps the others to grab the blender off a neighbouring counter. He slammed it down between the three of them, then grabbed the cracked punch bowl and started transferring the batter sludge into the blender. Helena looked around where Jake snatched the blender from.

"I don't see the top for the blender." She turned back to see Chris getting a spoon to scrape the last of the batter in. "Won't it be a problem without the top?"

"Maybe if we keep it low and just pulse it?" Chris suggested, putting the punch bowl into the sink. "It's pretty thick, so it should be okay."

"Bigger field's right, plus we're running out of time since we still gotta put it in the oven to bake." Jake looked over the dial and switched it to low before putting his finger on the pulse button. "If a little gets out, we can wipe it up."

Again, Helena wasn't completely convinced. "I don't know about this."

"Not like we have much choice." Chris patted the young agent on the shoulder. "I think it will be fine, and we can get the cooks in the group to see we're not completely incompetent."

Jake grinned their way. "They'll ask _us_ to do the cooking when we pull this off." He gave the blender a final once-over. "Okay, everything looks good." He looked positively gleeful, his finger on the button.

"Time to let 'er rip!"

$ $ $  
_|_|_|_  
|______|

"Please, explain this again."

Claire, Leon, and Sherry were standing in front of nothing short of a perfect disaster. Dark sludge dripped from the cabinet doors, the walls, even the ceiling. There were far too many gadgets strewn about. Sherry's favourite punch bowl lay on its side, unsalvageable. The oven door was open and blackish smoke still billowing out. At the center stood Helena, Jake, and Chris. Each wearing a sheepish expression amongst the batter gore splatterfest that was once Sherry's kitchen. They each wore further evidence of the epic catastrophe that had taken place. Helena's hair was thinly coated, as though she tried to get it off and it just spread further over the long strands. The front of Chris's shirt had several splotches and a few smears across his face. Jake was the worse, his face, neck, and shoulders all fairly covered. As the cleaner trio watched, some sludge on the ceiling dripped down, hitting Jake right on the top of his head.

The frowns on the non-splattered group deepened. Somewhere in another room of the house, they could all hear the sounds of Piers cackling and trying to breathe in between.

"No, really, enlighten us," Leon continued. "Please tell me again how you managed this in the span of _two hours_."

Claire shook her head. She's certain their hearts were in the right place, but Leon banned them from the kitchen for a _reason_, and now she was getting firsthand experience of what those reasons were.

"I just had the kitchen reno'd two months ago," Sherry complained. "_You_ were complaining about how much it cost," she added, pointing a finger just centimeters from Jake's nose and causing his eyes to cross. "So I would've thought you'd treat it better than... than _this_!"

"That's why I said you were spending too much. I did say it would just get dirty again." Jake quickly kick-stepped back when Sherry made a lunge for him, stopped only by Leon grabbing her around the waist.

"No killing him," the older agent scolded. "You don't want to have to hide a body the day before your birthday."

"It would be worth it." Sherry continued to scowl since her murder attempt was thwarted. Jake knew how fast she could be and edged himself just behind Chris just to be safe.

Chris sighed. They deserved anything that happened—well maybe not murder—and decided to quit stalling and prolonging the judgmental stares. "We thought we could surprise Sherry with a cake, and maybe show we could be useful in the kitchen. Obviously, both backfired."

"No shit!" The only reason Sherry wasn't sticking pointy objects into any of them was due to Leon keeping a firm hold on her. "My kitchen looks like a murder scene from a teen slasher movie!"

"They didn't... _We_ didn't think the blender would be that strong, and the batter had been partially mixed and was pretty thick. So we thought it was okay since we couldn't find the top." Helena couldn't put all the blame on Jake and Chris. She hadn't argued against leaving the top off, which is just as good as agreeing to it in her mind.

Leon glanced over to Claire, who nodded and took over keeping Sherry in place. He then rubbed slow circles over his temples as he felt the headache just on the edge of perception. "So you lost most of the batter when it went flying all over the place, but not all of it. And you decided you'd just use what was left and make a smaller cake. Right so far?"

"Yeah." Chris stepped forward, unconsciously shielding both Helena and an already cowering Jake. Once a captain, always a captain, even the 'squad' in this case were all equally to blame. "It was enough to move to a smaller bowl, and we didn't want to take any chances and hand-stirred the rest."

The older blond thought it good they still had a little sense between them, though not much. Leon turned away from the three to look at the oven, and the blackened pan full of an eldritch abomination that harboured some lost dream of once being food.

"So you managed to salvage the rest of the batter, even got it into a pan without incident—at this point a fucking miracle—and put in the oven." Blue eyes cut back to the trio and bored into them.

(Chris's heart might have given an extra beat because even now he found them beautiful in Leon's anger.)

"Yet despite getting that much right," the agent waved his hand to the horror residing in the pan, "you got that. Explain."

"...I thought we were running out of time and upped the heat," Jake admitted.

Oh, Leon knew he was not going to like this. "How high did you set it?" A home oven only went to around five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, after all. Unless...

"_Please_. _Please_ tell me," and everyone in the room blinked because none of them had ever heard Leon beg for anything. "_Please_ for the love of everything sacred, please tell me you did not try to _bake a cake_ by setting the temp of a _gas oven_ to _broil_."

The agent was ready to get on his knees if it meant not learning what he knew with horrific certainty would be a knowledge he could never un-know.

Jake chewed the corner of his lip a moment. "...I guess that was a bad thing?"

A deep breath, another, and a third. Leon promptly turned around, found a clean patch of wall, and proceeded to thump his forehead against it several times. Knowing the blond had checked out for a minute, Claire took over the conversation.

"Well, we now know how the baked nightmare came about. Do I even want to know what you put in it?"

"Probably not," Helena admitted, hand running through batter-laden hair. "We didn't look up proper substitutes until the first one turned out that way." She waved a hand in the oven's direction. "After that, we found a red velvet cake mix and decided to try again."

The trio remembered thinking they might need help and looked up things like substitutions and measurements online. They would never admit to being relieved the first cake died a tragic death after learning how completely they had fucked up. Helena didn't want to think about how it would have tasted.

"We followed the instructions to the letter this time," Chris added. "We even went to the cake site itself to be sure we could use a substitute for the oil, and what kind. And the batter looked okay, just... it..."

Jake cut in, "Wasn't red enough. I knew we had food colouring, so I grabbed the red and put some in there to brighten it up, that's all. Everything else, just like the box said."

As one, the group turned to look at the Day-Glo red cake sitting in the center of the table. It had been on a plate, but not frosted, so the colour was plain to see. Nothing about it looked natural, and the sane trio had no desire to so much as _entertain_ any thoughts of ingesting.

"We did follow the instructions," Chris offered. It did nothing to hide the skepticism in his tone.

Claire grunted, "I'm sure you did. But how much dye did you use?"

"Look, this is perfectly safe." Jake avoiding the question only served to make even his partners that much more nervous. He made a face at them. "Alright, pussies, hand me a knife and I'll _prove_ this cake is fine."

The unstained group glanced at once another, then Claire went and got a knife from the drawer and handed it to Leon; they still didn't trust Sherry with anything pointy just yet. Leon, in turn, passed it to Jake and gestured for the younger male to go ahead. Still scowling, Jake cut a slice that was larger than any of them anticipate, then simply shoved it directly in his mouth.

A stubbornness to rival the sun kept him from spitting it back out.

"Okay, obviously some of the ingredients were off," Jake said, refusing to think it was the dye. He only used a couple of tubed, after all. "Probably the eggs, I bet. But I'm telling you, we made it perfectly and you can't blame us if—what's with the phone, Pantene?"

Leon had his phone out and thumbed out three numbers. "I'm calling 9-1-1. It's faster if they take you than if we drive you there."

Jake's mouth dropped. "Are you..." His expression twisted and he slammed his palm on the table to snarl at the agent. "Look, asshole! That cake would have been fine if not for the eggs, and there is no way I need to go or _will_ need to go to the fucking hospital!"

$ $ $  
_|_|_|_  
|______|

Leon pinched the bridge of his nose. As was habit when dealing with this group, he questioned his life choices that led him to this place and time. "I know you thought you found a loophole by using Sherry's kitchen, but you really didn't. My exact words were, 'None of you are allowed in the kitchen.' Not _my_ kitchen but _the_ kitchen. The kitchen as in a room in any residence _that none of you are allowed to use_."

Helena and Chris appeared more sheepish than before. Jake couldn't muster the energy and just groaned from his place on the hospital bed. Sherry sat next to him, not a trace of sympathy but a great amount of smugness and vindication for her still messy kitchen, now with added red vomit on the floor. Neither Claire nor Piers were there having both been escorted outside the hospital for the noise level.

They were still falling over each other cackling like loons.

"What do you have to say for yourselves?" The older agent asked. He watched as Chris and Helena slid their eyes to each other, then forward to Leon.

"Remedial cooking lessons."

Leon stared at them. "...I should have stayed in bed back in 'ninety-eight."

Jake weakly groaned in agreement.

♡

**Author's Note:**

> So a couple of points that I belatedly realised might not be clear. 1. Mama Redfield was making scratch cakes, most likely pound cake with that many eggs. Chris just thinks all cakes are equal. 2. The eggs in the cake were fine, Jake just refuses to believe two tubes of food dye could be a problem. This one I did try and edit in, but I'll state it here in case it's still too vague.
> 
> Thanks for reading! ♡


End file.
